mayhap even the largest in all the world, took its place among those communities which owe their existence and growth primarily to commerce, their whole character and development for good and evil being more profoundly affected by commercial than by any other influences. Even in its very founding, the direction in which the great city on Manhattan Island should develop was foreshadowed, and its course outlined in advance.

Christiansen was soon killed by an Indian. For two or three years his fellow-traders lived on Manhattan Island much in the same way as men now live at the remoter outposts of the fur-trade in the far northwest of this continent. Some kept decent and straight; others grew almost as squalid and savage as the red men in whose midst they lived. They hunted, fished, and idled; sometimes they killed their own game, sometimes they got it by barter from the Indians, together with tobacco and corn. Now and then they quarreled with the surrounding savages, but generally they kept on good terms with them; and in exchange for rum and trinkets they gathered innumerable bales of valuable furs,mostly of the beaver, which swarmed in all the streams, but also of otter, and of the many more northern kinds, such as the sable and the fisher. At long intervals these furs were piled in the holds of the three or four small vessels whose yearly or half yearly